"I said we'd have to agree to disagree on that," Karp repeated in a tone that did not invite rejoinder. Solotoff locked eyes with him for a long moment, and Karp saw something in them that he could not identify-not fear exactly, but… something dark and complex. Then it was gone, and Solotoff laughed again. "Jesus, I had you going there for a while. Still the old grouch… good old Butch! Ah, here's our food."
They ate, and the conversation turned small. Sports, political anecdote, the antics of judges, movies, family. Solotoff was on his third wife, a cosmetics-empire heiress, and trophies of the hunt. Solotoff had the big condo on Park, the place in Quogue, membership in the best of the clubs that took Jews. He did most of the talking, he having the best toys. Boasting, sure, but maybe a tone of desperation there underneath? Karp wondered why this fellow was trying to sell a half-stranger his life in this way, or why he was trying to crap on Karp's. But he had determined to get through the wretched meal with good grace and covered adequately his lapses of attention. He found his mind drifting toward the Cooley case, running along in a parallel track that allowed him to utter the required grunts of appreciation, ask the appropriate questions. An idea rose, gelled-a plan, risky but feasible.
They finished. Karp declined the dessert and watched Solotoff line his arteries with creme brulee. Solotoff made a call on his cell, and when they got to the street, a pearl-gray Lincoln was just gliding up to the curb.
Solotoff shook Karp's hand vigorously and said, "Hey, I was serious a while ago. I hate like hell to see a smart guy like you fucking wasting his time." He lowered his voice "The DA's no place for a yiddisheh kop, bubeleh, and you know it. Let the goyim take out the garbage! See you around, pal."
Not if I see you first, thought Karp, but he smiled politely until the car door closed. By the time his own ride showed up, the plan was fairly complete. This is why I'm still at the DA, asshole, was the thought he threw after the retreating limo.
6
At The Seventeenth Precinct, the Desk directed Marlene to a detective second grade named Fred Paradisio, whom she found in a typical detective-squad bay of the type that has been described so often that it is as familiar as a suburban bathroom. It smelled of burnt coffee and sadness, and the mingled low-end aftershaves of its inhabitants. Paradisio was a barrel of a man with oily, thinning black locks, and a head disconcertingly wider at the jaw than at the top. He had large, friendly eyes that lied, "Hey, I'm just a slob like you, you can trust me, pal." Marlene identified herself and asked to see her daughter.
"Sure, Mrs. Ciampi," said the detective, "but if we could, I'd like to talk to you a bit first. You want some coffee or a soft drink?"
"I want to see my daughter."
"In a second." He pointed. "Have a chair."
Marlene bobbed her head and sat.
Paradisio settled himself in his swiveler and opened a notebook. "Okay, the situation here is that at two forty-six P.M. today 911 logged a call from your daughter saying that she had found a dead body in a makeshift shelter on a service walkway above the MTA rail yards. She was told to wait for the police. At two fifty-seven, a patrol vehicle arrived at Eleventh and Thirtieth, and the officers descended to the scene described by your daughter. This was a shelter made of newspapers baled together and waterproofed. Apparently there's a kind of homeless hangout under there."
"Yes, I know," said Marlene impatiently.
"Oh, yeah? You're down there a lot, communing with the homeless?"
"No, but she is."
"You mean you let her run down with those people? She's not like a runaway?"
"No, she is not. Detective, what's the point of this? I'd like to see my daughter now."
"Just a second, let me just get through this." He peered again at the notebook. "The officers at the scene entered the newspaper structure and found a black male later determined to be Jerome Watkins, and he was determined to be deceased at the scene. They called it in, and me and my partner proceeded there. We are ruling it a homicide right now, subject to further investigation. We rousted all the other derelicts in the area and found your daughter in a packing-crate structure occupied by a black male named Ali Rashid Kalifa, aka Moses Belton. Belton has a record: armed robbery, assault, larceny. Served a couple of jolts upstate back in the eighties. Did you know about this? Your daughter hanging around with that type of person?"
"Yes."
"You approve of this?"
"Detective, are you investigating my fitness as a parent?"
"Uh-uh, no, what I'm trying-"
"Then get to the point, finish whatever you are doing, and let me see my daughter!"
Paradisio looked hurt, in a studied way. "Fine. Your daughter actually found the body. According to this Ali, or Belton, she went and made the call, cool as anything, and then lost it. Ali or Belton said he was comforting her when we got there. She looked like she'd been crying, as a matter of fact. Okay, let me get to the point here…"
"Thank you."
"The structure where the body was found was occupied by a man named John Carey Williams, aka Canman. Williams is a two-fer man. He buys aluminum cans from other homeless and crushes them and transports them to the recycle center. Apparently this person is some kind of special friend of your daughter. We would really like to talk to him."
"You like him for the bum slasher?"
Paradisio's genial-slob persona nearly cracked beneath this unexpected remark, but he coughed and recovered. "Gosh, I didn't say anything about the bum slasher. I didn't even say that Watkins was slashed at all."
"But he was, or you wouldn't be going through this act with me. What is this, vic number four? Even if he's just taking out lowlifes, you still got a serial killer on your hands. You think Lucy saw something, or knows something about this Canman."
"Let's say she hasn't been forthcoming."
"If you would just let me speak to her, Detective, I'll let you know whether she knows anything or not. Or do I have to go all lawyerly on you now?"
Paradisio did not want lawyerly. Marlene was led to an interview room, in which she found her daughter with an American-history text and a notebook open in front of her, calmly doing her homework.
"Well, homework!" said Marlene. "We should get you in jail more often."
To Marlene's surprise, the girl rose and embraced her and said, "Oh, I'm so sorry! I mean about yesterday… I keep losing my temper at you. I don't know what gets into me. Demonic forces." Lucy laughed unconvincingly. Marlene held her away and looked her over. She was wearing her usual uniform: a black sweater over a white shirt, a black wool skirt, black tights, and some kind of surplus combat boots. There was no color in her face and her eyes looked bruised.
"You're forgiven. You're a model of filial deportment compared to the way I acted at your age. Listen, we got us a little problem here."
"I didn't do anything." Wary.
"I know you didn't, but they think for some reason you're withholding information, and you can't do that. Recall that you're still on probation from that stunt you pulled last year. You do not want the police cross with you. Sit down and tell me what happened."
Lucy slumped in her chair and closed her book with a bang. She took a deep breath and began. "Okay. After school I went to Holy Redeemer looking for David. He wasn't there, so I scouted around the neighborhood, you know, the homeless hangouts, and then I went down to the yards. I talked to Real Ali-"
"Excuse me, this is Moses Belton?"
"I don't know about that. I've always called him Ali, or Ali Rashid. I'm teaching him a little Arabic. He's a Muslim, the regular kind. Anyway, no one else was around, so I looked in Canman's paper house. There was someone on the bed there, and at first I thought it was Canman. He was all covered up with blankets. But then I realized that his dog wasn't there. And I went over and touched him, and I saw that it was Fake Ali. We call him… I mean, we called him that because he really thought he was the fighter. He was pretty crazy, but harmless, really a very sweet person, except if he thought yo
u were George Foreman. Anyway, I saw he was dead. And… I sort of lost it then-I ran back to Ali's and told him, and he calmed me down, and I walked up the block and found a pay phone and called the cops. That's it."
Marlene sighed heavily in the silence after this. "You really have the life, don't you, baby?"
The girl looked away from this sympathy and piled her books into the old musette bag she used. "Yeah. Could we go now?"
"Not quite. The detective out there thinks there's something you're not telling. About this guy Canman. John Carey Williams. He's a friend of yours?"
"Just one of the guys."
"Lucy, darling, now is not the time to be evasive."
Lucy bowed her head and froze. Marlene waited a minute. She could hear her daughter's breath go in and out. Then Lucy said, "I guess I saw him. When I came out of the paper house. He was on the access walk, maybe a hundred yards away, and I saw Maggie. His dog. I yelled at him, but he turned away and ran. I'm sorry. I should have told the cops, but…"
"He's a friend of yours. I understand. You know, the cops are starting to like him for the slasher. What do you think?"
"I don't know, Mom!" The tears started to leak. "I don't know anything anymore. Now, could we please go home?"
"You've read this already?" asked Karp, indicating the homicide report on the Lomax shooting. It had arrived four days after he had asked for it, the day the case, assuming all the players could be rounded up, would actually be presented to the grand jury, having been rescheduled from the previous Friday.
"Yeah," said his special assistant.
"What do you think?"
Murrow gathered his thoughts. "I don't know, chief. A couple of cars sliding around on the wet road, bullets flying everywhere… I mean, who knows what really happened? The report says the evidence is not inconsistent with the testimony of the officers involved."
"Yeah, but that's like saying the Warren Report is not inconsistent with the evidence they decided to gather and use." Karp tapped the folder on his desk. "There's something funny in this thing. No, two things funny. You know what they are?"
"No, and I'll bet you're going to tell me."
"No, you tell me." Karp opened the folder, splaying out the crimescene photographs over his desk. "What's wrong with this picture?" Murrow leafed through them. They were of the Cherokee and the surrounding road, and the unmarked police vehicle. The Cherokee was full of bullet holes, and its left fender and headlamp were smashed. The police unmarked was similarly damaged, with a severe crumpling of the left front and side. That much was clear; the pictures of the road and the side barriers, with chalk marks and tape measures, were more obscure.
"Well, there was a glancing head-on crash of some kind," Murrow ventured. "That confirms the cops' story at least. Lots of bullet holes in the Jeep. You can see where the slugs went through the rear seat. But wait a second…" He shuffled through the eight-by-ten glossies. "The windshield has three holes in it. That seems to confirm the police story. I guess I'm stumped on the fishy part."
Karp smiled. "The autopsy, Murrow! Holes in the windshield, but no holes in the front of the vic. Lomax was killed from behind. But I doubt if your pal Flatow is intending to bring that out to the grand jury. The guy had ten bullet wounds in him, with eight bullets recovered. Of those, seven were from Cooley's gun, one from Nash's. Nash must have shot the man after the cars stopped moving because he was driving during the chase and didn't have his gun out. Cooley was shooting from outside the car, too. But, of course, it's impossible to distinguish the shots he took then from the ones he fired during the chase. Like you say, cars whirling around, night, a confused situation. Lomax could have been bouncing around in there, and just by chance all the bullets ended up in his rear."
"Pretty unlikely, don't you think?"
"Very. But we don't build cases on unlikely, especially not with the Blue Wall holding solid. In any case, that's what the grand jury will hear." Karp collected the photographs, stacked them neatly, and returned them to the report folder. "Well, what else is new? A cop does a bad shooting and skates." He seemed lost in thought. Murrow waited a decent interval and asked, "What was the other thing? You said two things were fishy."
"Oh, right. The other thing is we got two experienced cops sitting on a street in the middle of the night waiting for a major collar to go down. They're waiting for a gun dealer, they're going to grab a bunch of automatic weapons-a pretty big deal. Then this car drives by. The officers state that they recognized the vehicle as stolen from a radio report and pursued it, which led to the chase in question and all the shooting."
"That's fishy?"
"Murrow, it's the fishiest thing about this goddamn case. It makes no sense at all. Let's say they made it as hot. Let's say the car belonged to, I don't know, the mayor's favorite aunt. Is it credible to you that they would have left their assigned position in a gun bust they'd been working on for weeks to go chase it? And if they chased it, does it make sense that they would have tried so hard to stop it with gunfire, in clear violation of police department regulations? I mean, where was the win in it for them? Even if they caught the guy, even if the chase didn't result in someone running into a car full of nuns, they were still headed for a gigantic chewing out. You assholes left your post for what? A stolen car? Give me a break! So what was it?"
"They were overtaken by a sudden insane animus against car thieves?"
"Maybe," said Karp, laughing, "but then they would have used the old sudden-insane-animus defense. No, really-it's the key to the whole thing. A fishy shooting is always a pain in the butt, even if it's a lot clearer than this one; you get a cop up there, he says he was in fear of his life, it's hard to prove even manslaughter beyond a reasonable doubt, never mind depraved-indifference murder, unless maybe he put ten bullets into an unarmed old lady in a nightgown in broad daylight in front of a bunch of Shriners. Here you got darkness and danger, you got a known felon in commission of a felony, you got a motor vehicle, deadly weapon in use-typically, that would be a gimme for the cops, and, you know, I wouldn't have even looked at it probably, if it wasn't so obvious that they were trying to sneak something through. On the other hand, if what we're looking at here is a personal thing, if Cooley and Nash weren't just pursuing a random hot car, if the reason they were so weirdly anxious for a crappy stolen-car collar was because they knew Mr. Lomax…"
"Then you have the element of intent," Murrow finished.
"Just right, Murrow: the element of intent. So- did they, in fact, know the man? If this was a normal investigation, we would get the cops to find out whether the two defendants had any contact with the victim, and what that relationship was. But since the defendants are cops, we can't, or we can't right now."
"Because of the… um?" Murrow gestured vaguely in the direction of the DA's office across the hall.
"Yes, because of the um. If I still had Clay Fulton here, it would be a different story, but they kicked him upstairs to Police Plaza, and if I went to that yo-yo who's running the DA squad now, the news of the request would be in Fuller's hands and up on the twelfth floor of One PP practically before I put the phone down. However, I have a plan."
"May one know it?"
"Not just now. Meanwhile"-here Karp looked at his watch-"you might wander by and see if the grand jury has taken up this case yet. It'll do you good to see corrupt practices taking place before your very eyes."
"Okay, but why don't I stand up and in a voice of doom cry out, 'Cooley! Cooley, you knew the victim! Cooley, you murderer!' Then if he turned white and fainted, we would know he was guilty."
"Good plan, Murrow. Let's use that as a fallback if mine doesn't work. Now, scram."
When Murrow was gone, Karp hit a speed-dial button. One of the secrets of the modern age is that every important person in the world has a private number, known only to a select few. Karp had one of these, and he knew a bunch of others, such as this one, mostly people in New York's criminal-justice and forensic establishments. Karp's mind d
id not often dwell on Judaica, but he liked the image of the Nine Just Men for whose sake Ha-Olam does not destroy the wicked world, and while he did not puff himself up so much as to consider himself personally one of these, he imagined that all of the Just would have each other's private numbers.
After a few rings, a throaty bass voice said, "Yeah, Fulton."
"Clay, it's Butch."
The voice turned softer, and they chatted about family, sports, the local scene. Fulton was one of Karp's oldest friends, one of the first black college graduates to serve in the NYPD and a mentor from Karp's earliest days at the DA. He had been head of the DA squad and had functioned almost as Karp's private police force until being promoted to inspector and kicked upstairs, where the bosses could keep a closer eye on him.
"They keeping you busy up there?" Karp asked.
"Oh, you know-it's paperwork mostly. They found out I could spell. Surprised the shit out of them, I think, me being a colored fellow and all. Strategic planning they call it."
"What's the strategic plan?"
"Frisk as many niggers as possible is the main one."
"Is it working?"
"Hey, crime rate's down. Of course, it's down just as much in cities where they don't do shit like that, but that don't cut much ice up here on the twelfth floor. How's by you?"
"Not that great, actually. I need to talk to you about stuff, but not over the phone. Lunch?"
"Sure, where at?"
"How about Lemongrass on Varick?"
Pause. "Isn't that a vegetarian place?"
"Uh-huh. It smells of carrots and no cop would be caught dead eating there. See you in a bit."
It did smell of carrots, and purity, and contained several elegant, slow-moving young waitpersons, who seemed by their expressions to be suffering directly from mankind's abuse of the planet. Lucy ate here all the time, which was how Karp had learned of the place. Both men had a meatless, cheeseless, taste-free dish of quasi-lasagna and filled up on the bread, which was surprisingly good.
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